Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen has received an interim report on ways to improve efficiencies in the health care system. KPMG was contracted to do the the study. Goertzen says it identifies areas where the system is duplicating itself and where there is not sufficient clarity on the roles of the minister's office, regional health authorities and health care facilities. And, he says, there's more.

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Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen"They've identified groups of things that are both inefficient, so things that can be done better by system overhaul or eliminating duplication, but also a number of things where they ask why Manitoba is doing things entirely differently than other provinces. There are some scenarios where Manitoba has some programs or is doing certain things in ways that no other province is doing. We want to have alignment within our own system but there needs to be alignment with other provinces as well."

Goertzen adds the report also found that there is no process to share innovations consistently across all facilities.

He says the information in the report will be used as the government prepares a new budget which will come down in a couple of months.

"You will certainly see a number of the recommendations that they have put forward, you'll see those appear in the budget and we'll be able to speak more specifically about them then."

Goertzen says it's important to have regular reviews of the health care system because it is so large and is prone to sprawl if unchecked.

"We're talking about a system that is half the Manitoba budget. It's a $6 billion operation. If you don't do this kind of exercise, have some sort of a process where you are continually re-evaluating and looking for innovation and doing it in a very coordinated way, if you don't do that annually, the system just grows again. And, it doesn't grow for bad reasons. Nobody is trying to make it a bad system. But it's so large that it has that inertia, where it will continue to grow in ways that you might not want unless you have those continuous checks."